Another benefit of Halloween newspaper articles is that the rare update appears via a well-researched and well-written piece. Today finds one of the best examples of this in "Tales from the swamp: From ape-like creatures to glowing lights, Hockomock has kept its secrets for centuries" by Ross A. Muscato, in the October 30, 2005 issue of the Boston Sunday Globe.

Muscato, in this long and detailed essay tells of how:

Over generations, many have believed the Hockomock is home to spirits, strange animals, and more. Stories abound: There are the vicious, giant dogs with red eyes seen ravenously sinking their fangs into the throats of ponies; a flying creature that resembled a pterodactyl, the dinosaur that could fly; Native-American ghosts paddling canoes; and glowing somethings hovering above the trees. There’s also talk of a shaggy half-man, half-ape seen shuffling through the woods.

The article recounts two sightings of this creature:

Joe DeAndrade thinks the swamp may be the habitat of a creature yet to be identified. In 1978, DeAndrade, then 24, was standing on the shore of Clay Banks, a pond in Bridgewater near the swamp. His back was to the water. ”I was standing there, and for some reason I had to turn around," DeAndrade says. ”It was a chill or something inside me.

”And I turned around, and there, off to the right, maybe 200 yards away, there was this — well, I don’t know what it was. It was a creature that was all brown and hairy, like a big apish-and-man thing. It was making its way for the woods, but I didn’t stick around to watch where it was going. I ran for the street."

Muscato goes on…

John Baker, a veteran fur trapper, was about a mile from his West Bridgewater home, on a canoe in a river in the swamp, laying muskrat lines on a winter night. Paddling along in the quiet, Baker heard a loud crash and rumble of an animal in the nearby woods. Frozen with fear, he saw a large hairy beast slog into the river and pass within a few yards.

”I knew it wasn’t a human because when it passed by me I could smell it," Baker said in an interview in 1998. ”It smelled like a skunk: musty and dirty."

It is a good article, an absorbing read.

For those readers in the Boston area, look for a new update, also, on your local television, to the Dover Demon story on this Monday night, October 31st, on Fox News 25 in Boston.

As Halloween fate would have it, I coined both words, "The Bridgewater Triangle" and the "Dover Demon," in my past writings, and I’m amazed they live on.